'you can't really figure out why...'

A friend sends me a clipping about a study in which Alzheimer's patients were shown sad movies and happy movies. Long after the patients had forgotten what movie they had seen, they still felt happy or sad, depending on the group they were in. And they felt their happiness or sadness more intensely than a control group of individuals with normal memories. "Because you don't have a memory," says the lead author of the study report, "there's this general free-floating state of distress and you can't really figure out why."

I think that's what was going on back in July when May was so agitated: she thought she was supposed to do something, and she didn't know what it was, and she fretted about it with no let-up day after day -- the anxiety living on for days after the cause had been forgotten.

She's been easier in her skin lately. The smile is back. She moves more slowly, and finds it harder to carry on a conversation, and I often find her asleep sitting straight up in her chair, but the edge has been rounded off.

In seven weeks, she will have been living at the residential facility for a year.